Eat like a Victorian: Bread, dripping, beer...yet in many ways 1800s food was healthier than ours. The 5:2 Diet guru reveals all in a new TV series

Victorians are all the rage – the brilliant series about Queen Victoria has just finished on ITV and my five-part living history series The Victorian Slum has just started on BBC2.
Before I made this series, I thought our modern diet, with all its variety, had to be superior to a Victorian one. Now I’m not so sure. It’s certainly true that, for many people, life in 19th Century Britain would have been extremely harsh.
Average life expectancy was just 43 years, and if you were from a poor working-class background it was more like 29. But that didn’t mean poor people dropped dead before they... read more

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